D Day ...... AD 43 .......Portrait Of An Age ..... and the death of General Gordan

Pan Edition 1961

I have begun re-reading The Great Invasion by Leonard Cottrell.

It was first published in 1958 and describes the Roman invasion and conquest of Britain.*

Now Mr Cottrell had himself been a war correspondent and this book was written only 13 years after the end of the last world war and must have had a real resonance.

“Among the readers of this book may be some who have known what it is like to wade on to an enemy beach under heavy fire. 

Others may have commanded troops in such actions, and experienced that nerve racking moment when all hangs in the balance, when the defenders have the advantage of protected positions, and the attackers have not had time to establish their fighting formations.” 

And in quoting Julius Caesar’s account of the military expedition to Britain in 55 BC Mr Cottrell observed that it “could almost describe an attack on the Normandy beaches or a Japanese island in the Pacific.”

So  there is a directness and a sense of authenticity about the account which other such later books on the subject do not give me.

Michael and Susan Henchard artist Robert Barnes, 1886

Now we all have our favourite books, the ones we return to time and time again to the point that we can  quote back at the author the opening lines or know just what awaits the leading characters just around the next page.

I never tire of those first few lines from A Tale of Two Cities and the sinister and chilling warning at the start of The War of The Worlds

In the same way I am still moved to indignation when the drunken  Michael Henchard sells his wife and daughter at the beginning of Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge.

But history books are different, and mainly because the scholarship moves on and what was fresh and new is at best old and tired and all too often has been proved wrong by new discoveries.

Some of course survive because of the style, wit and elegance of the writing.
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Thomas Babbington Macaulay’s social history and Young’s Portrait of An Age are still a joy to read.

I do not think you can better the opening of Young’s Portrait of An Age, **

O.U.P., edition, 1960

“A BOY born in 1810, in time to have seen the rejoicings after Waterloo and the canal boats carrying the wounded to hospital, to remember the crowds cheering for Queen Caroline, and to have felt that the light had gone out of the world when Byron died, entered manhood with the ground rocking under his feet as it had done in 1789.  

Paris had risen against the Bourbons; Bologna against the Pope, Poland against Russia, the Belgians against the Dutch.  

Even in well drilled Germany little dynasts were shaking on their thrones and Niebuhr,*** who had seen one world revolution, sickened and died from fear of another.  

At home, forty years of Tory domination were ending in panic and dismay; Ireland, unappeased by Catholic Emancipation was smouldering with rebellion; from Kent to Dorset the skies were a light with burning ricks.”

And I still enjoy  the closing lines of the essay on the Death of General Gordan by
Lytton Strachey in his Eminent Victorians which having surveyed Gordan’s life and the campaign to avenge his death concludes that “General Gordan had always been a contradictious person – even a little off his head, perhaps, though a hero; and besides he was no longer there to contradict .... At any rate it all ended very happily – in a slaughter of twenty thousand Arabs, a vast addition to  the British Empire, and a step in the Peerage for Sir Evelyn Baring.”****

Penguin Classics, 1989

Set against the measured, and dry writings of so many here is a sweeping comment on British imperialism and a cynical examination of the later Victorian period.

All of which is a long way I know from D-Day AD 43 and the great Roman Invasion.

On the other hand these are the sorts of history books which capture the imagination and want you to read more leading you on to even greater study, if only to know whether Lytton Strachey was fair or Mr Cotteril accurate.

And of course are as entertaining as the those first few lines from A tale of Two Cities and the sinister and chilling warning at the start of The War of The Worlds*****

Pictures covers from Pan Books, The Mayor of Casterbridge, the O.U.P. and Penguin Classics

*The Great Invasion, Leonard Cottrell, 1958

**Portrait of an Age, G.M. Young, 1936

***Barthold George Niebuhr, August 27 1776 – January 2  1831, was a Danish-German statesman and historian who became Germany's leading historian of Ancient Rome and a founding father of modern scholarly historiography.

****Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey, 1918

*****“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.”

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”

A lost Eltham Palace nu 1 ................ The Banqueting Hall

Now I have decided to run a few pictures of what Eltham Palace looked like in the 18th and 19th centuries.

It had long been abandoned as a home for royalty and its grand days were a thing of the past.

The occasional tourist up from London called in along with an interested artist keen to capture its former splendour but that was about it.

All very different from now, and a prelude to more stories of the building and its history.*

But in the meantime here then over the next few days are the Palace as you might have seen it during the early 19th century, all taken from that wonderful book on the history of Eltham published in 1909.**

Location; Eltham, London

Picture; The Banqueting Hall used as a stables from an old engraving, from The story of Royal Eltham, R.R.C. Gregory, 1909 and published on The story of Royal Eltham, by Roy Ayers, http://www.gregory.elthamhistory.org.uk/bookpages/i001.htm

*The Story of Eltham Palace, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/Eltham%20Palace

** The story of Royal Eltham, R.R.C. Gregory, 1909 and published on The story of Royal Eltham, by Roy Ayers, http://www.gregory.elthamhistory.org.uk/bookpages/i001.htm

A lost Chorlton bottle ….. the Beech Road offi ……… and a trip back to a Dickensian Manchester

It started with the find of a broken bottle in a garden on Wilton Road.

The lost and found bottle, 2023

My friend Declan wrote “Hi Andrew. Neighbours have builders in digging trenches for an extension. They unearthed an old glass bottle, possibly discarded when the houses were being built in the 1890’s?”

The shop on Beech Road, 1900s

It carries the name Mason and Burrows.

Now, I can date the house to between 1894 and 1903 when the property was occupied by a William Simpson.

And it may just be possible that he or a subsequent resident bought the bottle from a branch of Mason and Burrows “grocers & wine & spirit Merchants”.*

In 1895 they had shops on Moss Lane, Great Western Street and  Moss Lane East, and by 1911 had expanded further south to Stockport Road, 23 Wilbraham Road and 46 Beech Road.

The romantic un historian bit of me would like the bottle to have come from the Beech Road offi, which continued selling beer, wine, and tobacco into the 2000s before opening as "Espicerie Ludo, Wine Merchant and Fine Groceries”.

And as you do, I went looking for them.  So far, I have tracked them back to 1886 to Sun Entry, which was a small street off Cock Pit Hill and Bull’s Head Yard which was part of a warren of narrow streets and closed courts bounded by Corporation Street, Market Place and Market Street.

Sun Entry, 1886

They had a Dickensian feel, and non-more so that Sun Entry which snaked down from Cock Pitt Hill towards Market Street becoming progressively narrower till it ended as an enclosed passageway.

The area was already in existence by 1793 and elements show up on Tinker’s map a full 21 years earlier.

There will be a few people who remember the area before its demolition in the late 1960s which was replaced by that modernistic complex which included the Marks and Spencer store with its wavey canopy.

I wish I had known that older Manchester and walked the alleys’ and entrances.

In the 1880s Mason and Burrows occupied a large premises which fronted both Bulls’s Head Yard and Sun Entry and may have shared the “arched beer cellars” which extended down to the small and equally narrow Hopewood Avenue.

Sun Entry from Cock Pitt Hill, 1910

There is more but I suspect the historic record is not up to revealing the secret of the number on the base of the bottle which was 1302. It may be a reference to a batch or to one of the products they sold.

Bottle bottom with a number, 2023

But unless we can have access to one of their catalogues, I fear that number 1302 will remain in the shadows.

Still, I like the way that on a sunny day in Chorlton the story took us back into the late 18th century in one of those lost and now largely forgotten bits of the city.

Location; Wilton Road, Sun Entry and Bulls Head Yard

Pictures; the lost Mason and Burrows bottle 2023, Mason Burrrows shop, Beech Road circa 1900s Sun Entry, 1886, from Goad’s Fire Insurance Maps, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/ and Sun Entry, from Cock Pit Hill, City Engineers, 1902,and in 1944, City Planners 05914, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

Sun Entry narrows towards, Market Street, 1944

* Mason and Burrows, Slater’s Manchester & Salford Directory, 1895

A choice of images on Red Lion Street and the story of a lost church

From Red Lion Street, 2014

I am always fascinated at how a photographer chooses an image.

The best capture something about a place and time and leave you admiring the photo but also wondering about the stories that sit there.

This is Red Lion Street on the corner with Catlow Lane and we are looking at one of Andy Robertson’s pictures and instantly it drew me in.

He had been out by Church Street and “had passed lots of lovely buildings but was particularly interested in this one” and I can see why.

A sorry state

This is the rear of the place and it fronts on to Union Street.

Back at the turn of the last century it belonged to Harrison & Co who were carpet factors, and I should be able to follow its ownership back  another half century or more.

Today it is empty, and pretty forlorn.

What had once been a grand entrance is bricked up and painted over and the neglect is pretty apparent from the picture.  Some of the windows are broken, the warehouse doors look to be on their last legs and at least one window frame is in danger of collapsing.

Not a promising prospect.  But that said the building next door has been renovated and has a new purpose.

So in time and with some money so might this one.

The area in 1844

Of course a developer might just pull it down and fill the space with something new.

Now I could rail against this but this little bit of the city has constantly been pulled apart and rebuilt.

The property on the other side of our old carpet warehouse was in 1911 the Bulls’ Head and Commerical Hotel and there was a pub here as far back as 1844 and perhaps longer.

In this warren of tiny lanes and back streets there have always been those smaller enterprises whose fortunes have waxed and waned but were always central to the business life of the city.

St Paul's Church from Turner Street, date unknown

And it is important that people like Andy continue to capture the changes to an area which is often neglected.

That said of course we are on the edge of the Northern Quarter a place which once thrived, went through a pretty shabby period and has emerged as an exciting part of Manchester.

As you might expect the area has always been changing, and back in 1844 Catlow Lane was called Church Lane and continued across Red Lion Street to link with Chapel Street which ran beside St Paul’s Church.

This 18th century church faced onto Tib Street and had “an unprepossessing appearance; it is built of brick, with stone dressings, there is a tower at the west end, the top of which is entirely of stone.  

The interior is very handsomely decorated.  

There are three galleries, the pillars supporting the roof, are gilt, as well as the back of the altar, organ case, pulpit, &c.  

The church has lately been much improved by the addition of a handsome coloured window over the altar.  The choral service is performed here on Sundays at half past ten and half past six.”*

Interior of St Paul's

But it had gone by 1894 and today both this stretch of Church Lane and Chapel Street are buried under the car park.

So on the turn of a photographer’s choice of image comes a a jumbled collection of half stories with the promise of more to come.

Picture; from the collection of Andy Robertson and detail of the area in 1844 from the OS map of Manchester & Salford, 1842-44, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ and St Paul's Church, m80323, & m80324, date unknown,courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass 

* The Strangers Guide to Manchester, The Strangers Guide to Manchester, 1850

Lost and forgotten streets of Manchester nu 25 Ashley Lane ............. now even the name is lost

Now Richard’s picture of Aspin Lane as it runs under the railway viaduct is as atmospheric as you could get.

Aspin Lane, 2016

The wet stone setts, the lonely lane framed by that viaduct takes you back a century or more to another age when this bit of Angel Meadow was one of those places where “poverty busied itself.”

Like Richard I have spent many years wandering the streets around the old St Michael’s Rec and burial ground.  In my case it came after meeting the historian Jacqueline Roberts, reading her book on the area and using some of her material in classes I taught on working class housing in the 19th century.*

And it was she who first introduced me to the idea of using census material to engage students in exploring social history.  The unit focused on the streets around Irk Street, John Street and Back Ashley Lane in the 1851.

Ashley Lane, 1849

Here in just 16 houses lived 120 people, making their living from a variety of occupations from factory work, to cap makers, porters and that lowest of jobs, a brush maker.

Some like Mr and Mrs Shaw and their three children lived in the cellar of number 3 Back Irk Street, while round the corner at nu 3 John Street the eight members of the Riley family were squeezed into one of its two rooms.

So Richard’s photograph drew me in but as hard as I looked there was no Aspin Lane on the old maps, but that was simply because Aspin Lane was indeed Ashley Lane and an unknown photographer had got there before us and in 1910 took a picture from almost the same spot.

Ashley Lane, 1910

But all stories deserve a second look.

And after my old facebook friend Bill questioned me on my comment on the status of brushmakers I went looking for more on them. 

And the Working Class Movement Library offered some interesting detail, leading me to correct my assumption this was a precarious and low status occupation.**

Location; Angel Meadow

Pictures; Aspin Lane, 2016 from the collection of Richard Hector- Jones, and in 1910, m00218, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass  and in 1849 from the OS for Manchester & Salford, 142-49, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

*Roberts, Jacqueline, Working Class Housing in Nineteenth-century Manchester: The Example of John Street, Irk Town, 1826-1936 1983

***Brushmakers, Working Class Movement Library, https://www.wcml.org.uk/our-collections/working-lives/brushmakers/

The shop …………. Beech Road on the cusp of change

I liked the plant shop on Beech Road. 

I can’t remember when it opened up or for that matter when it closed.

It predated the full Beech Road revolution, so while we had Buonissimo, Primavera, and The Lead, we still had a Post Office, Muriel and Richard’s and an old fashioned offi.

More than that the shop did not offer up a sleek, ultra-stylish approach.

Instead it was a jumble of treasures, where plants rubbed up against porcelain figures of cats, garden statues, along with packets of incense and bits of furniture.

It was magic place and quite eccentric.

Location; Beech Road

Picture; the shop, Beech Road, 2002, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Looking for Dad at Eltham Fire Station in 1908

We will never know whether Lizzie’s aunt appreciated this picture postcard of our Fire Station.

But as she had been receiving regular such pictures of Eltham, I rather hope she did.

The added bonus was that there in the photograph was Lizzie’s Dad, which prompted Lizzie to ask “Do you recognise dad?

There is lots more detail but I rather think I will leave that up to you to search out.

Location; Eltham Fire Station











Picture; Eltham Fire Station,1908, courtesy of Tricia Leslie